jenova chen journey

Ten years later, Jenova Chen reflects on Journey

ThatGameCompany CEO discusses what the game meant to players and to himself, both personally and professionally

This weekend will mark the tenth anniversary of ThatGameCompany releasing Journey on the PlayStation 3.

A sombre and wordless adventure through a desolate environment, Journey was a rare offering at the time, an independently developed game with clear artistic aspirations given a prominent spotlight from a major platform holder in Sony.

Players' goals were communicated simply, a beckoning mountain in the distance with a beam of light emanating from within a rupture at the peak, a path of plant-like constructs that recharge the player's limited flying ability creating a path to who knows where.

The story was likewise less explicit than players were used to, with hieroglyphic-like cutscenes sketching out the demise of a lost civilization. The player character was similarly a rough sketch of personhood, a robed entity with pointy, angular legs, no arms, no discernable gender, and no facial detail beyond its eyes.

Even the game's approach to multiplayer did its best to spell out as little as possible, pairing players together without the usual indicators of online play and minimizing their communications. There was a button they could use to make their character chirp, useful for calling attention to an area or letting players know where each other is, but that was about it. There were no user names (until the end credits), no matchmaking lobbies, and no chat functionality, voice or text.

The game was a critical and commercial success, eventually garnering Game of the Year awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards and DICE Awards , as well as from numerous media outlets including IGN and GameSpot.

To mark the anniversary of Journey's release, TGC co-founder and CEO Jenova Chen speaks with GamesIndustry.biz about his takeaways from the game with a decade's worth of hindsight.

Fostering stories

"We were never expecting to see such a positive response when we were making the game," Chen says. "When the game released back in 2012, we started to see a flood of letters and emails, players sharing their stories with us of what the game has meant to them."

While some of the stories he heard from players were singularly remarkable -- one who fell in a frozen lake as a child and was clinically dead for almost two minutes said the game was a closer description of what that felt like than he had ever been able to describe -- Chen was struck by one particular kind of story he had heard dozens of times.

In each of those stories, the players told Chen that they had lost a loved one shortly before playing the game, and became convinced that their silent partner through the game was actually their loved one having come to say goodbye.

"When they played through the game together, it helped them to grieve," Chen says. "It helped them to let it go, knowing their loved one was going to a better place. I never thought the game would have the power to be essentially therapeutic, to help people, but it's changed many people's lives, and that's the biggest surprise to me."

"Exposing the other player's PSN ID with an inappropriate alias could kill the mood immediately... We had to work with Sony to figure out a way to block those names until the end of the game"

Those stories were facilitated by the design choices that went into Journey's multiplayer.

"Exposing the other player's PSN ID with an inappropriate alias could kill the mood immediately," Chen says. "Just hiding the player's PSN ID is not enough because we noticed that the PlayStation cross media bar offers a feature where you can see the name of the recently interacted player aliases. We had to work with Sony to figure out a way to block those names until the end of the game."

User names weren't the only standard of the time TGC ignored.

"We also removed the gender and age identity in the way the avatar is designed," Chen says. "We also removed the arms of our players, so they can't punch and push each other for fun and to be rude. We removed the personal possession so players don't stay away from each other to avoid stealing and competing over resources, etc."

And while Chen says it wasn't something he understood as clearly at the time, he's since become more mindful of how the context developers give players shapes their behavior.

"A lot of people have a very negative connotation about players online being mean and aggressive, particularly over voice chat," Chen says. "And I think by now it's very clear that it's not the people who are mean. It's the environment that brings out the mean behavior. The same people who were teabagging each other in a shootout in Call of Duty would be playing Journey the next minute. And those same folks, the teenage console players, would come to our forums and leave posts saying, 'To whoever was with me, I'm sorry that I had to go without being a companion with you to the end because my mom really needed me to go. But I hope you can see this post that it was a wonderful experience.' These people writing apologies to someone they don't even know, they're the same folks.

"Ultimately, we human beings are capable of being gentle and compassionate only when we're in an environment where we're capable of compassion"

"Ultimately, we human beings are capable of being gentle and compassionate only when we're in an environment where we're capable of compassion. When you put a person onto a battlefield and give them a gun, their first thing is to think, 'How am I going to protect myself from being killed?' Or 'Am I going to be able to use this gun to kill someone else?' Imagine if you give someone a first aid kit [instead]. It changes their mode of thinking and behavior."

For Journey, Chen says the key to creating a healthier environment for player interactions was to make them feel a sense of awe.

"Essentially, that makes them feel small and vulnerable, and we believe that sense of vulnerability allows people to open up and connect with each other," Chen says. "Because when you realize how small and fragile your life is, you can easily relate to a fellow human being and how their life is fragile and small. So you're more likely to think about how you can help this person, or how the two of you can stay stronger together.

"But most video games are focusing on simulating competitions, and it's a power fantasy for boys who don't have many freedoms. When you give them too much power, they're thinking, 'Who has the stronger power?' I'm Superman, you're Batman, who's the stronger one here? But if we're both refugees in a war, we wouldn't be thinking about fighting it out to see who's stronger; we'd be thinking about how we can survive."

The decision to limit multiplayer to two people also stemmed from that same approach. Early on in the game's development, Chen says they tried to design the game around three or four players, but quickly found situations regularly devolved into having an "us" and "them" mentality where part of the group would want to do one thing while a single person wanted to do something else and would be left out or left behind, a disappointing experience they found ran counter to the emotional reaction they were hoping to spark with the game.

Chen says TGC's current game, the Journey spiritual successor Sky: Children of Light, was an attempt to tackle both of the above issues, and he's pleased with the results so far.

"Deep down I was always curious if I could tackle this problem with a bigger crowd," he says. "Can I still create emotional bonding with more than two people? So Sky is our challenge to the next step. If you could actually chat and you had more than two people, can you still protect the community and create an environment where people show the brighter side of their humanity rather than what we consider the darker side?"

Personal impact

Journey -- and the reaction to it -- changed Chen's life as well.

"Personally, it made me feel very lucky," he says. "We always think of struggling artists. Artists tend to be loners and weirdos growing up. They tend to think outside the box, and are the minority. It's a lonely kind of life.

"I feel loved. I feel not alone. And that's a wonderful experience"

"But art connects the artist with the audience. Knowing that something you put your life into -- something you cared about, dreamed about, something you thought about every single day -- was able to reach to a lot of people and they heard your voice and appreciated your children... loving your children is like an extension of me loving you. And I feel loved. I feel not alone. And that's a wonderful experience. This feeling of gratitude is also what gives me the inspiration to make future games."

It's a nice payoff considering Journey had a difficult development cycle that dragged on longer than initially planned.

"What is happening in the artists' mind and life will influence the game," Chen says. "Journey was a very difficult to make game. And the struggle we had during development also reflects in the game's final struggle level. It's a mirror of the people who worked behind it."

Unfortunately, a significant portion of those people were gone from TGC before they were able to enjoy the results of their work. At the point of the game's release, the studio had been running on fumes, with Chen saying it was $200,000 in debt.

"We couldn't afford anybody's salaries," he says. "We had a celebration. We took a retreat in the mountains, celebrated, and then we disbanded the company, so everybody had to find new jobs."

The crisis was brief -- Chen says it took up to six months for TGC to start getting its portion of sales from Sony and the studio also raised several million in funding three months after launch -- but long enough that a chunk of key talent left the studio. Chen notes that a number of those who left returned for second stints with the company.

Beyond changing the roster of creators at the studio, Journey also changed the company's remit to some extent. Journey was the exclamation point on a three-game partnership between TGC and Sony -- Flow and Flower were the first two titles -- and even though those games were tremendously well received, they also emphasized for Chen that a console platform holder like Sony was not an ideal partner for his goals.

"TGC's games are meant to be played by a much broader range of players due to its emotional accessibility. And I felt the destiny of TGC is to make games for everyone rather than hardcore console players"

"What really dawned on me was that TGC's games are meant to be played by a much broader range of players due to its emotional accessibility," Chen says. "And I felt the destiny of TGC is to make games for everyone rather than hardcore console players. And we decided to help TGC reach its destiny, our next game needs to be on platforms where everyone has access to hence cross platform between mobile, console and PC. We started with mobile since it was the most difficult platform to develop on. The rest is history."

The company's fortunes have improved considerably since the time of Journey's launch, but Chen seems equally proud of the impact the game had beyond his studio.

"I think it's a good thing for the industry because a lot more people started to consider making their own narrative games that had strong emotional impact," he says. "I think that's really what the industry was lacking at the time. We're not short on amazing combat, driving, and sports simulations. We were lacking on the more emotional, nuanced, artistic side."

The gaming audience has been growing older, he says, and it's only natural their tastes in entertainment have been changing as well.

"Right after Journey, in the past decade we've seen so many powerful, emotional narrative pieces coming out of the industry from both indie and AAA [developers]," he says. "That's a real big change, and I think more people now are looking into the possibility to use gameplay as the main narrative drivers for emotion. There was a time when emotional story only happened in the cutscenes, but nowadays, a lot of the games make you cry even when you're playing. That to me is a great advancement in the industry. "

The Great Dilution

Despite that advancement, Chen is clearly still sensitive to how the rest of the world views the games industry. In announcing a $160 million investment round last week, TGC's press release included a quote from Chen saying, "Our mission is to elevate games as a legitimate form of art... Animated feature films have had genre-defining moments with Snow White and Toy Story, and we will continue working toward this moment in the gaming world."

When we ask about whether that question of games as art hasn't been settled long ago, Chen says things have changed considerably over the decades, and games are already seen as art by the people who grew up playing games.

"Video games are farther away from being respected as an art form by the mainstream"

"On the other hand, video games are farther away from being respected as an art form by the mainstream," he says. "From 2014 until now, is what I call the 'Great Dilution' for the game industry. Thanks to the social and mobile game expansion, we see a 10x growth in the total population of people who have access to gaming content. But the majority of the new games came out on mobile and social platforms focused on pure growth rather than respect. While more high quality artistic games are made year after year, this dilution drastically shifted the public impression on the gaming industry.

"I judge whether video games are a respectful artistic medium by watching people's response after I tell them 'I make video games.' I expect when video games are indeed legitimate art, the reaction wouldn't stray too far from what you would get if you are a writer, choreographer, architect or filmmaker.

"In 2005, people told me 'Oh you guys ruined our kids by making them addicted and violent.' Today, mainstream society still views games as mostly serving the role of babysitters, a stress relief or an addiction. [Terms like] 'Spiritual Opium' and 'Virtual Gambling' were used by various governments last year. When I told someone outside gaming I make video games recently, he responded 'Oh, I heard gaming is big money. How much money do you make? How many overtimes do you have to work?'"

Even if there's still a ways to go when it comes to mainstream understanding and acceptance of games, Chen is clearly glad for the progress that has been made, and for the role Journey may have helped play in that.

"After ten years, I feel very grateful for what happened," Chen says. "It's also strange because we're growing the company and I interview people and they tell me, 'I played Journey when I was 13 years old!'

"It makes me feel old, but at the same time it's rewarding that this is a game that changed people's perspectives."

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Ten Years Ago, ‘Journey’ Made a Convincing Case That Video Games Could Be Art

Creative director Jenova Chen conceived ‘Journey’ as an act of rebellion against commercial games. The decidedly emotional titles it inspired forgo violence and point scoring for matters closer to the heart.

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To borrow internet parlance for a moment, Journey is a video game designed to hit you right in the feels. You play as an androgynous character dressed in a sweeping red robe, dwarfed by stark landscapes of sand and snow. Pushing the PlayStation controller’s left analog stick, you move forward, slowly at first, and then, later in the game, with exuberant speed, as if you’re surfing. Most of the time you’re alone, but if you’re lucky, you’ll come across another figure, its silhouette fluttering in the distance. You might travel together for a few minutes and then part ways, or perhaps you’ll reach the end of the game in one another’s company. Regardless, this time will feel almost miraculous—a chance encounter at the very edge of the world.

The game’s setting gleams with flecks of Gustav Klimt gold while a single towering mountain dominates the horizon. The game is called Journey for a reason, and its deliberately allegorical story curves toward tragedy, as if this is the fate awaiting us all. Unlike most games, you die only once. Rather than a cheap metaphor for failure, it’s something heavier—a crescendo, an act of self-annihilation.

Now, it’s widely accepted that games can move us in ways similar to novels, movies, or music, but in March 2012, when Journey came out on PS3, this simply wasn’t the case. Sure, there were the works of Fumito Ueda, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus —stark, artful games of the aughts from Japan that tugged more on the heartstrings than the itchy trigger finger. So too had the rise of independent games from 2008 onward given birth to a slew of newly personal titles such as Braid . Journey , however, felt different—a video game with levels, an avatar, and enemies, but that, mechanically, eschewed almost all else to focus entirely on movement. The game had cutscenes, but these were reserved for establishing shots of glinting sand rather than moments of genuine dramatic thrust. What Journey achieved—which few, if any, video games had before—was giving you a lump in your throat while you actually interacted with it. This was a big deal.

In this way, Journey helped crystallize the idea that video games could and should be more. In 2007 and 2010, respectively, Bioshock and Red Dead Redemption , games with knotty philosophical questions at their violent cores, had pushed the blockbuster shooter and open-world adventure into newly grown-up territory. But these were also time-consuming experiences that asked you to sink tens of hours into them to get to their narrative payoffs. Journey , by comparison, could be finished in 90 minutes, the length of a film. Certain kids, myself included, grew up convinced of video games’ artistic merit but lacked a work to express this conviction succinctly. Journey was the perfect title to convert churlish nonbelievers—our parents, for example.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Gregorios Kythreotis, the lead designer of 2021 indie breakout hit Sable , remembers it like this, too. Kythreotis, who was 19 in 2012, had just started studying architecture, a discipline perfectly suited to the thoroughly spatial medium of 3D games. He was struck by Journey ’s confidence: It was the rare minimalist game whose carefully chosen elements had been executed exactingly. The “biggest thing” he recalls, though, was the fact that he felt he could show it to people who didn’t play video games. “They would play it and often be wowed,” he says over Zoom. “It was a lot friendlier and [more] accessible in this regard.”

Alx Preston, the creator of critically acclaimed 2016 action game Hyper Light Drifter and the recent open-world adventure Solar Ash , tells me over a video call that it was Journey ’s singular style that caught his attention. “There weren’t a ton of games out there that had this type of look,” he explains. “This type of vibe, these types of color palettes, that wasn’t focused on violence or goofy, silly cartoony things. It was carving out its own niche.”

Clayton Purdom, who was then writing at Kill Screen , one of the era’s hip new video game publications, echoes this point. (Disclosure: I wrote for Kill Screen while Purdom was editorial creative director.) “I remember interviewing someone who talked about it as a ‘dinner party game,’” he tells me over a video call. “I’m never gonna have a dinner party where we all sit around and play Journey , but it makes sense. The game’s this really digestible, concrete, audiovisual narrative experience that’s fundamentally interactive.” In 2013, a month before the game’s release, Kill Screen ran the headline : “Is Journey creator Jenova Chen the videogame world’s Terrence Malick?” The comparison doesn’t really land beyond a shared fondness for stirring panoramic landscapes, but the question speaks to a time when many were attempting to frame video games as worthy of serious cultural discussion—as if you’d talk about them with your friends in the same breath as the latest Sundance hit.

Chen, the creative director of Journey , was held up as the poster boy of this movement, and so he was first in line for criticism. In 2010, film critic Roger Ebert wrote a gamer-baiting piece titled “ Video games can never be art .” At the behest of a reader, Ebert was encouraged to check out a TED talk by Kellee Santiago, a cofounder of the studio behind Journey , thatgamecompany. Santiago made an argument to the contrary, referencing, among other games, the studio’s previous title, Flower , in which you play as the wind carrying an assembly of petals. Flower was heralded as a game changer when it was released in 2009, an emotional, nonviolent title that even a novice could play by virtue of its simple controls. (The player tilts the PlayStation 3 controller to change the wind’s direction.) In 2013, it was added to the Smithsonian’s permanent collection and described as “an important moment in the development of interactivity and art.” Ebert, however, took a different view, batting the game away with a typically terse one-liner in which he compared its aesthetic sensibility, not entirely unfairly, to that of a “greeting card.”

When I speak to Chen over Zoom, he doesn’t mention Ebert by name but references the wider discourse. It was a “sense of rebellion” that drove him to make Journey , the idea that games should appeal to an audience beyond the young men who were interested in fist-pumping shooters like Call of Duty . (These games “weren’t actually mainstream,” he says, “they just had billboards on the street.”) Linked to this was the perception of video games in his home country of China as “virtual drugs” that caused people to drop out of college and neglect their relationships.

During the early years of his pursuit of a computer science degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Chen snuck into art classes. A few years later, he studied digital art and design as part of a cross-university collaboration with Donghua University. At the time, he and a friend would make video games in their college dorms, Chen art directing and his friend programming. There was little information on video game software available in China, so Chen’s partner learned about game-making from books sent over by a cousin in the U.S. Still, even while Chen was making games as a hobby, he didn’t consider it a viable career path. He intended to become an animation director like those at Pixar. “I felt like that was an industry respected by society,” he says. “I could tell my parents that I wanted to be an artist in this field and they couldn’t say it wasn’t honorable.”

Art as a career was an ongoing point of contention between Chen and his parents. He was born in Shanghai in 1981, five years after the end of the cultural revolution that sought to purge China of its pre-communist art and culture. Despite being an avid drawer, he characterizes his childhood as one devoid of art. Of these early years, he remembers that the sky was always gray except when it had just rained. The dust from the construction sites of the rapidly expanding city would lift and he’d be able to “smell the soil in the air”—for a brief time, “the sky was blue.” In an effort to steer Chen toward “respectable” employment in the modernizing country, his parents enrolled him in a coding class at the age of 10. “In China there was no plan from the government to take care of the elderly. Your kid was your retirement insurance,” he says. Despite initial misgivings about the coding classes, Chen quickly came to look forward to them thanks to the video games his classmates played before lessons.

Chris Bell, a designer on Journey who joined thatgamecompany halfway through the game’s production, says Chen possesses the complete package of skills needed to make video games. “He’s an artist, a programmer, and an engineer,” Bell tells me over a call. Having excelled in programming, Chen rekindled his childhood artistic impulse as a teenager when Shanghai began to open its door to international artists in the 1990s. On the way back from school, he’d stop off at the art galleries in People’s Square. “I would check literally every single show,” says Chen, who savored these “windows to the outside.” When it came to contemporary art, the teenager would ask a central, probing question: “Why does it deserve to be on the wall?”

Fast-forward to 2009. Chen, who had moved to the States six years earlier to study interactive media at the University of Southern California, was wrapping up production of Flower , the second of three thatgamecompany games published by Sony. (The first was a life simulator called Flow .) He was vibing off how people were responding to the game, particularly the finale of its movielike three-act structure, and he was ready to take the lessons learned at USC to the next level. But Zynga had just exploded onto the scene with its interpretation of social gaming, the hit Facebook game FarmVille . Chen remembers watching the company’s CFO give a talk at an industry conference. Having proclaimed the future of gaming as social, the CFO urged indie developers to quit their passion projects and join the company. “Everybody was pissed,” he recalls. “I felt their anger, too. I was like, ‘Who are you? How can you say that you define social games?’” For Chen, social meant an emotional connection between people, not just “trading vegetables with someone on FarmVille .”

This became the seed from which the rest of Journey grew. Chen wanted to show the world a game in which you truly emotionally engaged and connected to another person. It was another “act of rebellion,” against both Zynga’s transactional idea of connection and traditional multiplayer games filled with “foul-mouthed, teabagging” kids. When Matt Nava, the art director on Journey , interviewed to join thatgamecompany in 2008, the first question Chen asked was how he’d approach the social world of Journey : What would it look like, where would it take place, what would happen? Nava, “sweating bullets,” replied, “When you see another player in the game, through the visuals and the setting, you should immediately want to go to them. You want them to be the respite in the environment.”

Nava’s art, both elegantly minimalist and capable of summoning a deep, mythical history, is central to the success of Journey . In the same interview with Chen, Nava suggested brightly colored characters inhabiting a barren desert setting. This would become the game’s defining image. These creatures are humanoid but not identifiably human; they have bright eyes but no other facial features. The world they inhabit is filled with ruinous temples, tombstones, and sand that glints and glitters as if its very surface is dancing. When your character moves over these particles, their pointed legs deform it as if the grains have a physical presence, not just a flat, lifeless texture. Your character’s scarf, flapping in the wind like a ribbon, has a tangible quality, too, another component that tricks you into thinking this is less a computer program than an actual place of elemental forces.

You’re also swept along by Austin Wintory’s rousing soundtrack, which (in lieu of any text or dialogue) functions much like a narrator. “The music is very much a guide for the player,” says Wintory, who admits he felt a huge amount of pressure as a result of the soundtrack’s prominence in the experience. The composer was keen to avoid dictating emotions to players; rather, he wanted to create a musical environment in which they could bring their own “emotional projection into the equation.” Wintory refers to a feeling of “camaraderie” between himself and Nava; the pair would “riff a lot,” almost as if they were in a “feedback loop” with one another.

Nava, whose father is also an artist (the creator of a series of grand tapestries that hang in a cathedral in downtown Los Angeles), says he was obsessed with creating an “iconic” art style . He did so while working within the technical limitations of the PlayStation 3 and, more importantly, what he and the small team could physically produce in the allotted schedule. In the late aughts, out-of-the-box game-making software such as Unity and Unreal (now industry standards) weren’t yet widely used, so thatgamecompany had to build their own set of custom tools. In the early phase of development, Nava and graphics programmer John Edwards went back and forth constantly about what was and wasn’t possible. Ultimately, it was a case of “if you don’t need it, you don’t make it,” so they homed in on the fundamentals of the world: characters, architecture, sand, and fabric.

Despite a strong central idea and a mass of raw talent at thatgamecompany, the production of Journey was challenging. Executive producer Robin Hunicke, speaking five months after the game’s release at Game Developers Conference Europe, referred to a nearly catastrophic level of miscommunication within the team. Bell, who was hired initially as a producer and who later transitioned to a game designer role, took it upon himself to act as a mediator. Some relationships became so fraught that Hunicke described them as breaking down into “personal grudges.” At one stage, Nava arrived at work to find there was already a full-blown argument happening. He quit on the spot, only for Santiago to chase him down the sidewalk and coax him back into the building.

As time wore on, one deadline with Sony passed, and then another. The company’s finances were in such dire straits that Chen and the founding members of thatgamecompany all dropped to half salaries for the final six months of development. Nava says the team fell into the same trap as so many creators who believe that “in order to make great art, it was worth the suffering.”

During a period of acute creative drift, an exasperated Nava took it upon himself to design a level, much to Chen’s annoyance (as lead artist, this was categorically not Nava’s remit). From his perspective, there were a handful of mechanics but nothing was really sticking, so he focused instead on creating a series of “atmospheres” that the player would progress through. Nava thought back to specific “moments” he had in mind when he was painting the concept art, and then fed them back into the levels. The most famous of these sees you hurtling through a stone tunnel while a sumptuous orange sun sets to your right. “Thinking about it as moments was the real trick,” says Nava. “That’s what people remember the game for.”

The gambit paid off. When it was released on March 13, 2012, Journey received rave reviews from outlets such as The Guardian (“the best video game I have ever played”), Eurogamer (“a “sand-blown chunk of spiritual eye candy”), and IGN (“one of gaming’s most beautiful, most touching achievements”). Nava is right to point to the “moments,” which Kythreotis remembers as “a really special aesthetic experience,” as key to its creative success. But the multiplayer is integral, too—arguably an overlooked aspect of the game that to this day breathes an improvisatory life into it. Humans behave differently from AI characters; they move erratically and compulsively, both too slowly and too quickly, and this discord, which takes place against the game’s pristinely melancholic world, is vital to its balance.

Still, the production took its toll on the team. Bell and Nava both exited soon after, citing difficulties relating to the company culture. As Nava explains, they weren’t the only ones: “I don’t think many people fully understand what happened,” he says, “but [thatgamecompany] shut down basically. Everyone left.”

The studio was later revived for the production of 2019 iOS title Sky: Children of the Light , another multiplayer exploration game albeit set amid billowing clouds. In 2017, Bell returned as a designer, noting a broadly positive change in work culture. Chen was now decidedly in charge, whereas before there had been wrangling over decisions between him and his thatgamecompany cofounders. With a bucketload of VC funding rather than a Sony publishing deal, the company had more time and money to explore different ideas. Since then, thatgamecompany has continued to grow. A few days after my conversation with Chen, his company announced a $160 million investment deal alongside the recruitment of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, who will serve as principal adviser on creative culture and strategic growth. I suspect a younger Chen would be pleased at this development: a titan of Hollywood animation joining his artistically committed video game studio.

How should one assess Journey ’s influence? It’s not Grand Theft Auto III , a blockbuster behemoth that inspired a deluge of imitators (mostly hyper-violent open-world crime games such as Saints Row ). If you look at the following decade of games, few bear the explicit influence of thatgamecompany’s flagship title. Oceanic explorer ABZÛ and open-world puzzler The Pathless are exceptions, but these were both made by Giant Squid, the studio Nava cofounded in 2013 following his departure from thatgamecompany. Importantly, Journey showed Nava both what games could be and how not to make them, a lesson he carried into his new studio, one built on making “artistic games” in a culture that is “sustainable and happy.”

In a wider sense, Journey helped engender what we’d now call a vibe shift. Put simply, if video games mostly traded in the various emotions related to killing shit, point scoring, or problem solving, Journey was part of a new wave that broadened their dramatic texture. Purdom threads a line between Journey and small-scale interactive works such as Florence , If Found … , and, most recently, puzzle game Unpacking , each of which tells decidedly personal stories. “I think, in some ways, it did help break ground on the whole ‘games are emotional’ angle,” he says. Some titles arguably leaned into sentimentality too hard—2016’s Unravel , for example, an almost unbearably cute platformer starring a yarn of wool. Despite a slew of games Purdom refers to as “feelings porn,” Journey also led to experiences that were, for lack of a better word, more “honest.”

Purdom, however, is rightly wary of ascribing too much importance to Journey . It came out the same year as Gone Home , a first-person exploration game that centers on a queer relationship, and 13 months after Dear Esther , a macabre, William Burroughs–inspired adventure set on a blustery Scottish island. Each was influential in its own way, but the legacy of these games resides more in how they collectively pushed a different emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic agenda to the mainstream. ( Kentucky Route Zero , Cart Life , and Papers, Please are a few of my favorites from the time.) Still, these were all games you had to play on your PC with a keyboard and mouse. Journey , published by Sony for the PS3, “helped kick open the door in a more popular way,” says Purdom. “You could throw that game on and play it on the couch.”

Journey immediately became the fastest-selling game on the PlayStation Network at a time when most titles were still bought in brick-and-mortar stores. For Nick Suttner, who was working as a senior product evaluator in Sony’s third party department, the game was “perfect ammunition.” He and a small team were responsible for getting games onto the PlayStation Store in an era when resources for such titles were highly contested. “We had to fight for everything,” he tells me over Zoom. “Indies just weren’t part of the ecosystem.” The success of Journey fed into what Suttner calls a “holistic push” at Sony, which had also included a three-year, $20 million publishing fund for indie games that was announced in 2011. A year after Journey ’s release, explosive blockbusters Killzone: Shadow Fall , Destiny , and Watch Dogs dominated the PlayStation 4’s glitzy announcement, but amid all the gunfire was The Witness , a serene, first-person puzzle game. It felt like part of a sea change in priorities at Sony that Journey was partly responsible for.

However, Sony’s support for indies wouldn’t last. A few years later, when it became clear that the PlayStation 4 was trouncing the Xbox One, the company’s focus shifted back to blockbuster game development. Sony poured resources into the next generation of megahits, such as The Last of Us Part II , Marvel’s Spider-Man , and Ghost of Tsushima . Along the way, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio, which was both the developer of the God of War series and an incubator and publisher for indie developers, had a game canceled. This meant layoffs on the development side and a deprioritizing of the publishing division that had launched Journey a few years earlier.

On December 1, 2016, the indie-oriented publisher Annapurna Interactive announced its formation, led by Nathan Gary, the creative director of Sony Santa Monica’s indie development efforts. Chen, who has been variously described as a “scout” and “spiritual adviser” to the company, refers to himself as “more of a cofounder.” Having sourced investment for Journey ’s follow-up, Sky: Children of the Light , Chen was perfectly placed to introduce Gary to potential funders. After securing a deal with Annapurna, itself a film production company behind a string of auterist hits including The Master , Zero Dark Thirty , and Her , attention turned toward signing games. If there was a guiding principle, says Chen, it’s that he and Gary were looking for game makers who were ready to put an aspect of their personal life into the game. Chen describes this as an “innately artistic” approach; the creators are “honest,” saying something that is “truthful to their own lives.” Crucially, these works are more likely to resonate because, as Chen sees it, “our lives are all intertwined.” In other words, we see ourselves in these games.

Chen says Annapurna was also looking for emotional tones underrepresented in games. He mentions 2017’s What Remains of Edith Finch , a game he characterizes by its “dark humor,” and one that his former colleague Bell took a lead role in designing. Maquette , released in 2021, fits the bill, too, a decidedly Hollywood-feeling romantic drama wrapped around a mind-bending puzzle mechanic. In fact, almost the entirety of Annapurna Interactive’s roster is a reflection of the central thesis that has steered Chen’s career, namely that gaming must look beyond the 15-to-35 male demographic if it’s ever going to evolve, let alone be taken seriously.

When I ask Chen about Journey ’s influence on the wider gaming landscape, he doesn’t mention specific titles or trends, but pulls focus back onto the work itself with, to my surprise, an extended music metaphor. “If you want an orchestra to move people, then every instrument has to perform the same piece of music. Every element contributes to the storytelling,” he says. “And what we learned is that the interactivity is the soloist. It’s the lead of the orchestra in gaming. A lot of games in the past have told emotional stories— Final Fantasy , for example—but they relied on traditional media. I love it, but the moving part, the part where you cry, is when you watch the cutscenes. At that moment, what really touched you is cinema, not games.”

In a way, it’s surprising how few blockbuster games have internalized this lesson. The recently released Horizon Forbidden West is a good example. When I play that game, it moves me, but mostly because of the sense of awe I feel at its shimmering, windy world . It’s the same for Ghost of Tsushima and the Uncharted games. That’s not to deny the validity of these experiences, but their moments of personal drama are delivered without the player’s input. Journey , in its own very specific way, figured out how to make drama interactive. Purdom refers to Signs of the Sojourner , an indie card game about friendships and conversation, as a “next step” in this regard. “It’s a mechanically complex game entirely in service of inspiring these kinds of emotional experiences,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I’m feeling regret because I hurt a friend’s feelings thanks to the way these cards played out.” My own mind is drawn to Hideo Kojima’s postapocalyptic hiking simulator, Death Stranding , and the grueling slogs my character endured through snowy mountains. These interactive journeys mirrored the protagonist’s emotional arc, and each landed with greater heft as a result.

This is the magic of Journey . At the start, you move tentatively but curiously. In the mid-game, you’re cascading down dunes at extreme speed. And during the very lowest moments, you’re barely making a step at a time. Then, when you have nothing left to give, you stop moving entirely, however hard you push forward on the controller. “What Journey did really well,” says Chen, “was to make interactivity the climax—the memorable moment.”

Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including The Verge , Wired , and Vulture .

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The Inventory

Journey, From The Creators Of flOw and Flower, Explained

flOw and Flower developer thatgamecompany is making something new, Journey , a game that's about singing, sand, hiking, cloth, surfing, astronauts and feeling small. And, in a radical departure for the team, it uses two whole buttons.

Interview: Jenova Chen wants to transform video games

in the News

August 2, 2023

Jenova Chen has had a clear professional goal for more than a decade: get the world to take video games seriously — to see them, simply, as the ultimate art form.

Why it matters: For Chen and some other creators and players, gaming’s rep among many people as a frivolous pastime provokes a strong counter-response.

Full interview available here: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/31/interview-jenova-chen-sky

Entertainment /

Journey creator’s new game is designed ‘to battle against the human nature’

Sky: children of the light is a theme park for altruism.

By Megan Farokhmanesh

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If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Journey creator Jenova Chen is drawn to making positive game experiences. Thatgamecompany’s latest title, Sky: Children of the Light , is an exploration into altruism and kindness, wrapped up in a beautiful mobile experience.

But just as Journey made Chen eager to create something players could share with their less video game-inclined friends, Sky has taught him an important lesson as well: people sort of suck.

“We also have to make sure the social dynamics don’t become hostile,” Chen says. “We want this to be a friendly experience ... we designed so many things to battle against the human nature, to keep this world friendly.”

Journey , released in 2012, was an instant hit among critics, who praised its gorgeous world and innovative storytelling through mostly silence. Although you could feasibly finish the game alone, the real joy was stumbling across other players and traveling together. You could only communicate via chirps and physical actions.

Sky is, in many ways, an evolution of the concepts the developer explored with that title. The mobile game is an online experience in which players work to restore fallen constellations and restore light to the world. It’s social by nature. Players have a wide world to explore through seven different realms, yet much of it is made to encourage players to interact with loved ones and strangers. Characters can hold hands with up to eight friends to guide them through the game. It has its perks. It’s easier to fly with friends, who act as an energy reserve for better soaring. Chen likens this fantasy world to a theme park. Different realms offer different experiences: some offer exploration, competition, or meditative experiences; another he likens to a sort of petting zoo for kids.

But setting the game’s world up as a park has also invited its share of bad behavior. “Once we bring all these people into a theme park, all the troubles start,” Chen says. Sky ’s character can be customized with cosmetics. This led to what Chen called “karma beggars.” Basically, players lovebomb strangers to win currency before abandoning them. Or more succinctly: “People are shitting on each other,” Chen says. “This is a game where I don’t want the seven-year-olds to say dirty words in the lobby. Imagine Disney Land, people being like, ‘Anybody wants to buy hearts? Pay me $10 bucks and I’ll do this.’”

“I don’t want the seven-year-olds to say dirty words in the lobby”

That’s not to say that Journey was not without its share of jerks. Chen says that when Thatgamecompany first designed their breakout game, players were often pushing each other off hills, or working to get their partners stuck.

“They liked to see the other player getting frustrated,” he says. “In childhood psychology, any gamer that goes to a virtual world immediately reverts to baby mode. The morality, the moral value, does not carry into a virtual space. In any virtual space, people are seeking maximum feedback. If I can get you frustrated and you display that emotion, that’s way more exciting than just me helping you out.”

This struggle against basic human nature has been in part why Sky has taken so long to finish. He describes the game initially as a roller-coaster, a linear experience. But as iOS games grew in popularity, people became less willing to pay for the experience. Sky would need to be a free-to-play game.

“Nine out of 10 gamers on the phone have never seen a console game,” he says. “There is no trust built between [the player and developer]. So, the first thing about human nature is, everything is cheap.”

Accounting for all the ways players can use each other has also taken time to sort out. The developer rebalanced the game’s economy in an attempt to make its interactions more genuine. “[If] the only way to get karma is from people, then I will be thinking about how I will get these people to give me karma,” Chen says. “You become manipulative.” But if you offer players another way, their kindness toward other players feels genuine.

Chat is restricted in Sky to only people you’ve built a relationship with via emotes. A stranger can’t barrel into your conversations and start screaming obscenities. Instead, players are encouraged to spend time with each other, get to know one another through physical actions, and build trust. Of one player he’s opened chat with, Chen says, “We’ve unlocked the understanding of each other.” Leveling up intimacy, so to speak.

Sky: Children of the Light is heading to iOS as a free-to-play game on July 11th . tvOS, Android, macOS, PC, and console versions will follow at a later, unannounced date. After years of balancing and testing, Chen says he finally feels like the community they’ve built is a friendly one. It just took some working around people’s natural inclinations.

“In the process of wanting to encourage people to give, we actually have to allow them to get, selfishly, so the gift actually appears to be altruistic,” Chen says. “If you don’t have the dark, you don’t have the light. When there’s no dark, every light seems suspicious.”

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'Nobody is born toxic' says Journey's creative director while preparing to launch the kindest MMO on PC

Jenova Chen says the modern internet is basically like handing shotguns to babies but toxicity can be prevented by good design.

Sky: Children of the Light - a player gestures for you to follow as three others frolick in a grassy meadow

After the critical success of its emotional, musical adventure Journey in 2012, Thatgamecompany's creative director Jenova Chen had aspirations to reach a much broader audience of players. Journey was popular on console, with an audience that Chen jokingly described as men in their 30s who were conveniently journalists and awards judges, but "teenagers hated Journey," he said. I must have been an outlier.

So Thatgamecompany decided to make an MMO, a genre that's definitely popular with teens, but rarely synonymous with the wholesome, friendly experiences with strangers that Journey was known for. During an interview at GDC earlier this month, Chen told me all about the challenges of designing a non-toxic social space in Sky: Children of the Light , just ahead of its PC launch.

Sky: Children of the Light - two players hold hands while being chased by alarge flying guardian enemy

"There are so many things currently wrong with how the internet was designed," Chen told me. "As a designer, I'm just really pissed that people are so careless when it comes to maintaining the culture of a space." He said that too many online spaces, from YouTube comments sections to online games, are geared so that people are constantly encouraged to seek out the biggest reactions—by being shocking, trolling, or downright offensive. When given so much power to affect those around us, it's as if we revert to some primal baby state, seeking constant social feedback for good or ill.

Chen had been thinking about this problem back during Journey's development too. During his GDC talk this year, "Designing to Reduce Toxicity in Online Games," Chen described the many iterations of Journey's core systems that it took to ensure that players would see each other as friendly collaborators instead of competition for resources. In the end, Thatgamecompany nailed it—all my memories of Journey are those magical moments with an unknown other player patiently guiding me through a tough area or walking into the light together at the game's end.

"When we made Journey, that very person who was teabagging another person in Call of Duty was suddenly posting on our forum to say: 'For that person who I was playing with, I'm so sorry I had to go. My mom called me for dinner,'" Chen says. "That's the same player who was a nasty person in another game. So I realized that nobody is born toxic. It's really just the environment we formed."

Sky: Children of the Light - two players share an umbrella together in a rainy forest

Cultivating an anti-toxic environment became a critical part of Sky's development. TGC utilizes tools for reporting and resolving offensive messages, but Chen said that his goal for Sky was to introduce positive, preventative measures rather than reacting after damage is already done.

"One of the most useful things we're doing is that you have to earn your rights to apply your social power." Jenova Chen

"You have to get a permit to get a shotgun, right?" (Thatgamecompany is based in the US, where this isn't universally true, but for the sake of the argument let's pretend you do.) "But shotguns are given to too many babies who are new to the online community. They have no understanding of social norms but they are basically blasting very controversial sentences because they're eliciting maximum feedback." Public text chat, for instance, is a staple in other MMOs that Sky just does not have. "One of the most useful things we're doing is that you have to earn your rights to apply your social power," Chen said.

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One of Sky's cornerstones is what Chen calls a "dual consent" system of socializing. In Sky, everyone you see around you is initially an indistinct silhouette. To even see one another's in game appearance you need to both hold a candle out to each other signaling your agreement to interact. To become official friends, you both have to actually spend a candle, Sky's main progression currency. To unlock additional interactions like emoting together, sending text chats to each other, and eventually teleporting to one another, you have to continue spending candles. They aren't preventative rates, because you're always continuing to earn candles as you play and explore, but offering them up to befriend another player is a signal of trust and goodwill.

Sky: Children of the Light - a player offers a candle of friendship to another

The most another person can annoy you without your express permission is by flying around erratically nearby and making Sky's universal chirping noise in whatever voice tone they have equipped. I did once nickname a person "wailer" because they were using the most annoying voice setting and just chirped constantly as we flew together but even that was just my own private joke since players can't see what you've named them and you don't see their real username. The hidden nicknames are just another way that Thatgamecompany has attempted to reduce the "maximum feedback" players are capable of getting from one another.

They've not always gotten it right. During his talk on toxicity, Chen described one implementation of the social benches in Sky—places where players can sit together and exchange text chat. For a period of time, benches could fit eight players at once, a group audience that represented a tantalizing opportunity for the reaction-seeking baby brain. There was a briefly notorious "eggplant boy," a player who would sit on a full bench and spam the eggplant emoji to a group of other players chatting. So now the chat benches are back to a one on one experience.

It's now been almost five years since Sky: Children of the Light initially launched as a mobile app, and I've got high hopes that TCG's anti-toxic design will hold up to the coming influx of PC players despite our reputation. And if not, it's still going to be in early access a while yet.

Sky: Children of the Light is a free-to-play MMO that's been in open beta on mobile and consoles. It launches in early access on Steam on April 10.

How to add a friend in Sky: Children of the Light How to earn ascended candles in Sky How to collect seasonal candles in Sky

Lauren started writing for PC Gamer as a freelancer in 2017 while chasing the Dark Souls fashion police and accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as the self-appointed chief cozy games enjoyer. She originally started her career in game development and is still fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long books, longer RPGs, has strong feelings about farmlife sims, and can't stop playing co-op crafting games.

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Jenova Chen: Journeyman

From the archive: Journey's creative director on his quest to become the best gamemaker in the world.

Just over three years since it was first released, and having become one of the critical darlings of the last generation , Journey is being re-released for PS4. Digital Foundry will be looking at the technical upgrade the game's received, and in the meantime here's Simon Parkin's profile of Journey's director, Jenova Chen, originally published in April 2012.

"There's this quotation from St Augustine..."

Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare. Trust the designer of Flower and Journey to invoke a 3rd century theologian as an entry point to the subject of online tea-bagging. "Augustine wrote: 'People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.'"

Chen takes a quick breath. "There's this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player online, it's going to be a bad experience," he continues. "You think that they will be an asshole, right?"

I nod, still thinking about Augustine and the sense of wonder I've felt since first sitting down to talk to this studious Chinese game developer.

"But listen: none of us was born to be an asshole," he says. "I believe that very often it's not really the player that's an asshole. It's the game designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games are about killing each other, or killing one another together... Don't you see? It's our games that make us assholes."

Chen and I meet for lunch a few days before the official release of his latest game, Journey, in a bustling café a couple of hundred metres from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It's filled with loud bits of conversation, snatches of dialogue from people taking a food stop midway through the Game Developers Conference.

Chen speaks with the manner of a computer science nerd; quietly thoughtful in a way that some might take to be nervously arrogant. But his words are that of the exuberant preacher, a humanist sermon to a congregation of one delivered as a call to action for game designers to create better systems in order that they might create a better online world.

Not for the first time during out lunchtime discussion, I touch my arm and feel goosebumps. Chen, as a music journalist from the 1960s might say, has soul . But where did this heart come from? What journey led the designer here?

The Call To Adventure

At the age of 14, perched on the edge of his bed in a tiny apartment in Shanghai Jenova Chen put down the controller and cried.

"My parents were incredibly strict about what I was allowed to read or watch," he tells me. "I had limited access to novels, television or movies so this game was the first piece of media that moved me to tears. It was my first cry and it was so deep and strong. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before."

The Legend of Sword and Fairy is the equivalent of Final Fantasy 7 in the Chinese RPG history. Its story of love and loss deeply affected a generation of Chinese. "Looking back today I find the game shallow and clichéd," he says. "But it was the first impact a medium made on me in this way, and I fell in love."

Through those tears Chen found catharsis (a term he returns to time and time again during our conversation) and, when they had dried, he felt a peace in which he began to question his existence. "I found myself asking: what kind of life do I want to live? What is good? What is bad? Why am I here? Afterwards I felt like a better person."

"Then I began looking to the future and I decided that I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others experience what I had just felt. I didn't know it was gong to be through games at that time, but I knew it was going to be through something."

For the first 22 years of his life, Jenova Chen didn't leave Shanghai.

His was a childhood defined by boundaries: physical, social and parental. The city's over-crowding confined his family to a small apartment. China's one-child policy ensured he had no siblings, while the country's lack of state or company run retirement plans placed full responsibility for his parents' pension on his shoulders.

The burden to succeed at school in order to earn a good salary was immense. For Chen, a gifted and talented young student placed in a class of high achievers, this pressure was heightened yet further still. "It's a cruel system," he tells me. "Every semester the last three kids in the class are kicked out. I was in this elite class so if you were kicked out you dropped to a 'normal' class and people would call you a loser."

Boundaries, competition, leaderboards: all societal systems that Chen grew up with and that are also prevalent in most videogames. And yet, they are curiously absent from his creations. I ask him if the pressure of growing up within these physical and psychological confines is what has drove him away from competitive, task-based games. After all, Flower is set in the countryside, its chapters interspersed by short cut-scenes showing a wilting flower in an urban apartment, perhaps dreaming of freedom from Shanghai, while his latest creation, Journey, is a game with the capacity for multiplayer competition wholly removed.

Until now, Chen has spoken in gentle voice, pausing to compose each response, occasionally reflecting inquiries back at me. But at this question he becomes visibly irritated. "I am a competitor," he says. "I play and love competitive games. You know, I was champion at a fighting game in high school. I was a StarCraft champion in college. I still play DOTA. I love to win. I love to win. When it comes to making games it's not like I love peaceful games. I make this kind of game because I want to win as well. To me the measure of a human's greatness is the value they can contribute to society. The game industry doesn't need another shooter; it needs something to inspire them."

I ask if his competitive streak means he wants to 'win' at game design, and if he's exploring a less explored area of game design in order to increase the chances of this.

"Right," he replies, smiling. "It has nothing to do with me hating the education system. I survived the education system."

The Road Of Trials

The Buffalo Grill. That's where we're eating and it's by design. Chen tells me this is the place he first ate at on his first trip to GDC, eight years ago and that's why he's brought me here. Following his life-changing experience with The Legend of Sword and Fairy at 14, he decided he wanted to become an animation director, making films in the style of Studio Ghibli.

But during college some of his friends decided to make a game and roped Chen in to create the assets and animation. "In the end we made three games," he says. "They were all clones, of course, but good ones! One was a Diablo clone and another was a fully 3D Zelda, like The Wind Waker."

"Ambitious," I say.

"I know, but we totally pulled it off." When he graduated from college Chen won a place at the University of Southern California to study film, and he largely forgot his experiences making games. But when his lecturers discovered his ability to code (the computer science shtick is no accident - he studied the subject during college) he was enrolled in the film school's game program.

Rather than fighting against the decision, Chen embraced it, the competitive side of his persona realising that games offered him an arena in which to potentially make a greater impact than Hollywood.

"Film is very established; you have a genre for every single thing you want to feel," he says. "No matter your age, genre, nationality and mood there's something for you. But for games... You have a thriller, horror, action film, and sports victory film. But there is no romance, no drama, no documentary, and no thoughtful examination on life. These are basic feelings humans want to have in life, but they are just not available in games. That's why lots of people stop playing games as they grow older; they want to feel these things but games don't offer it."

It's Chen's view that most video games only cater to the kind of experience that young people are interested in, and the rhythms of learning and mastery that come later in a human's life are relatively untouched.

"Games are, in essence, tools for us to learn something," he explains. "When we were kids playing in the playground we are really learning about our own bodies, and discovering basic social dynamics with other kids. But as you grow older and become a teenager you move to games like basketball and soccer. You learn teamwork. But you rarely see people over 35 still playing these games. That's because they already learned and mastered those skills. You look at older people and they play Poker. Poker is a game about deception, calculation and manipulation; they are useful skills to master later in life. Golf is another example. Golf isn't really about the game so much as the social connections. And the interaction and stimulation you get from playing with someone."

"I believe that there are only three ways to create valuable games for adults. You can do it intellectually, whereby the work reveals a new perspective about the world that you have not seen before. The closest thing I can see to this is Portal. The second way is emotionally: touching someone. You can touch kids emotionally very easily, but it's far harder to touch adults because they are so jaded.

"The only way you can touch an adult is by creating something especially relevant to their lives, or by creating something that is so authentic that it becomes empowering. In order to reach those heights you have to reach catharsis. So that after the strong emotion the adult can begin to reflect on his own, start to find meaning in his own life. That's how I can see I can make games for people around me. The third and final way is by creating a social environment where the intellectual or emotional stimulation could happen from other people. Those are the only three ways."

So Chen began to study game design at film school and, one spring, USC sent him to GDC. "At that time I just presumed every American kid was a coding genius like John Carmack," he laughs.

"But I came to the IGF booth to check out the student games and I was like: 'These games are crap!' Like, the games I made in college were way better than any of these things. I was with my friend and I turned to him and said: 'Let's make a game. We can do better than this.'"

When Chen and his friend returned to USC they began working on a game called Cloud, a flight game that he revealingly dubbed 'a childhood dream simulator'. All children dream of flying away, but for Chen, defined by boundaries, the longing was perhaps stronger than most. The pair released the game onto the web as a free download and it wasn't long before Chen began to receive emails about his creation.

"I had messages from people in Japan saying they had cried while playing. Someone even told me I was a beautiful person for making this game. My entire life and nobody told me I was a beautiful person. So I sat back and wondered: what went right? What's the difference between this game and the others? The only difference I could think of was that the game makes you feel differently. In that moment I realised this was my life calling. Rather than being a film or animation director I could change what people see games as. I'd go as far as to say I feel like I have a responsibility to do it."

The Vision Quest

In 2006, two years after Chen had first been underwhelmed by the IGF entrants, his game Cloud won the Student Showcase competition at the same event. Despite this, the designer is critical of his creation, saying it's a bad game because the controls are "unintuitive". I ask him what, if that is the case, exactly resonated with players to bring the game so much attention. "I think it's the innocence and the loneliness and the feeling of being free yet melancholy at the same time," he replies.

Isolation and detachment is certainly a theme to Chen's work to date. I wonder why he is attracted to that?

"I guess because we are creators, we tend to be lonely most of the time," he says. "There's a desire to be connected as artists. We want to feel understood, and that our voice has been heard. The fact I received 500 emails with Flower... I felt like I said something and someone heard it. And because we are mostly lonely as human beings the desire to be accepted by others is so strong. When people experience a shared sense of loneliness their immediate reaction is to reach out and make contact. I would imagine anyone who is creating something is searching for connection."

He looks directly at me: "For you as a journalist, you are looking for somebody to hear your voice, aren't you?" I take a bite of my hamburger.

This sense of experiencing a shared sense of loneliness is at the heart of Chen's latest game, PSN download title Journey, a game that sits precisely within the designer's vision for creating games that create space for new kinds of emotional experiences.

But with a three year development (a year over schedule) for a two to three hour game, it was a far from straightforward project, and one in which the elusive emotions Chen was seeking to elicit were tough to summon. "Journey used to be a four-player game," he reveals. "And four player games offer many more social dynamics. It's a lot more interesting. But I was obsessed with creating a unique connection between two people, and so I found that having two extra people in the mix hurt that connection. It's much harder to create a meaningful four player game than a two player one."

"The reason we wanted to create Journey besides reaching that cathartic moment in the end was to create a real connection between two people. The reason I do that is because most people are saying right now: social gaming is hot. But no other game is really socialising, as in the emotional exchange between two humans. In almost all games the only exchange between two players is bullets or numbers. On Facebook it's more numbers, on PC and consoles it's more bullets.

"So I wanted to see as a designer whether I could create an emotional exchange. Originally we created all of the typical co-op mechanics. Saving one another, healing, opening a door together, you know: 'You step on here, I step on here and something opens..." And I realised that those are all still mechanical exchanges. To really exchange feelings you need to prepare players to be ready to exchange emotional feelings."

"There's this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player over the Internet, it's going to be a bad experience. You think that they will be an asshole, right? But listen: none of us was born to be an asshole. I believe that very often it's not really the player that's an asshole. It's the game designer that made them an asshole."

Chen looks around and motions in the direction of the GDC convention centre.

"I'll explain," he says. "When I'm walking in the convention centre I am thinking about where I need to be and at what time. I am in task solving mode. I am not interested in socialising. This is exactly how it is in most video games. The vast majority of multiplayer experiences are about task solving. But if players are in task solving mode they are not in the right frame of mind to exchange emotional connections. So to prepare them we had to remove everything about tasks: all quests had to go from Journey, all puzzles. And so then, it's more likely the player will be ready to engage in social contact."

He pauses. "Then we worked to make you feel lonely. In that mental state players begin to have a longing to connect or to get close to something or somebody like them. So that's what we did. We removed everything in order to have an environment where people can exchange emotion."

I point out that, with this lack of mechanic, Chen appears to be trying to replicate a social interaction that might occur in real-life. But while that's an interesting experiment, it doesn't necessarily say anything or speak to anything wider. Was he trying to make a point?

"There is this quotation from St Augustine."

Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare.

"Augustine wrote: 'People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.'

"There's this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player over the Internet, it's going to be a bad experience. You think that they will be an asshole, right? But listen: none of us was born to be an asshole. I believe that very often it's not really the player that's an asshole. It's the game designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games are about killing each other, or killing one another together... Our games make us assholes."

"Or about turning other players into a resource, used to open doors and so on?" I interject.

"Right," he says. "It is the system that made the player cruel, not the player themselves. So if I get the system correct, the players are human and their humanity will be drawn out. I want to bring the human value into a game and change the player's assumption."

Chen reaches into his pocket to pull out his iPhone. "I want to show you something," he says.

"Last night Journey was made available to PlayStation Plus subscribers. A few hours later some players started a thread on the game's forum called 'Journey Apologise Thread'."

"What's that?" I ask.

"Read for yourself," he says, handing me the phone.

It's a list of players thanking and apologising to the anonymous players they encountered on their journey through the game.

I am so grateful for your assistance tonight. You were so patient when my flying skills didn't add up.
I'm really sorry I hid behind the rock and had a panic attack when that thing first came at us. It kinda caught me off guard.
To my friend in the fifth area. I never wanted to leave you. I just whiffed really badly on a jump. I miss you. And I'm sorry.
To everyone I played with: thank you for never leaving me.

As I read through the list, Chen smiles at me.

"I have goosebumps," I say.

The Meeting with the Goddess

There's a short lull in the conversation as we both work to clear our plates a little. The food has grown cold.

After a while Chen begins speaking again: "There was a point in Journey's development when I hated myself."

"Why was that?" I ask, looking up.

"We made a prototype where players could help one another to accomplish tasks. One of the developers suggested that it might be fun to introduce a wind so strong that players could only pass it by pushing one another. At that point we didn't have any collision detection so we added collision to create the mechanic. But you know what happened? When the team could push each other around in the game all they would do is try to push one another into the deadly pits. Even though we all knew this game was to be about positive things about humanity, everyone just wanted to kill one another. I couldn't resist the urge to do that myself. So for a period of time I was so sad and disappointed in my teammates and myself."

"Then I ran into this child psychologist I told her about the dilemma in the game. And she said to me: 'Oh, your players are just becoming kids again'."

"What did she mean?" I ask.

"I asked the same thing. And she said: 'when kids are born they have no moral values. They don't know what's good or bad. So they seek out actions that give them the strongest feedback."

"I don't understand," I say.

Chen begins banging on the table with his fork. A couple on the table next to us turn their heads, unsure of whether to be concerned or irritated.

"A baby does this, right?" he says. "And you tell them to stop, but instead of stopping they do it louder still. To the baby this action is giving them strong feedback and attention. And this psychologist told me that this is like when players enter a virtual world for the first time. They are like babies. They don't know the rules so they perform actions that give them the strongest feedback. She said: 'the best way to stop a baby from doing something you don't want them to is by giving them no feedback.'"

"The thing is, everyone is seeking for maximum feedback. If you push someone in the pit then the feedback is huge: the other guy dies, there's animation, sound, social tension and the opportunity to revive her. These things combine together make pushing another player into a pit much more satisfying than just pushing somebody into the wind."

"I see," I say. Chen stops banging on the table. The couple return to their hamburgers. "So what happened when you removed collision detection?"

"Players started looking for other ways to get more feedback. Helping each other yielded the most feedback so they began to do that instead. It was fascinating."

The Hero's Journey

Our time is almost up. While the joy of GDC is the lack of PR people to chaperone designers, allowing for free and unfettered conversations like ours today, natural deadlines are set by the need to attend sessions, take meetings and so on. We clear our trays and begin to meander back to the convention centre. But I am still intrigued by Chen's comparison of games to films, a traditionally unpopular association for game designers such as him. Does he think the ties are so close? Perhaps there are some subjects that video games are ill equipped to tackle, or some emotions that video games are unable to elicit.

"No. Gaming is the medium that can combine all facets of film with interactive design," he says, firmly. "To all intents and purposes, games should be more capable than film. But the fact is that gaming is still a subset of the film industry. It's tragic. I see so much potential. I feel like there is so much more I can do here."

That competitive side of Chen's psyche flares up again.

"So what we try to do is spearhead emotional content. If the entire game industry is focusing on excitement and adrenaline rushes... well, then I will look at peace, or love. That way we can expand the perception of what games can be and can accomplish. That's why I make games. That's why I am on this journey."

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Jenova Chen
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Ten years later, Jenova Chen reflects on Journey
Jenova Chen
LE CRÉATEUR DE JOURNEY NOUS DIT TOUT !
Game Designer Jenova Chen On The Art Behind His "Journey"

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A giant bird god thingy
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Journey
Journey

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Ten years later, Jenova Chen reflects on Journey

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